Day Six - Joy Moore
Joy Moore
Day Six
It’s early, just after sunup. I slept poorly last night, much of it consumed by visions of Xander. He knelt at my bedside, begging for forgiveness. He cried and flailed and swore he wasn’t dead. He murmured in my ear, reminding me how much I need him, how lost I will be without him.
The room undulates when I sit up, and it takes me a second to get my sea legs. Sweaty sleep clinging to my skin, I change into the clothes Gloria brought me the other day—a gray T-shirt, a pair of cotton pants.
Gloria waits in the hall as I ready myself in the bathroom.
I’m a fright. Pale and hollow cheeked. Bags under red eyes, one of which remains swollen.
My bruises are a bilious green. After splashing water on my face and brushing my teeth, I exit my room.
Gloria takes my arm, and I’m grateful for the assistance.
All I want is to turn around and climb into bed.
Outside, the sun is too bright; I squint and shield my face. There’s a car waiting. Gloria opens my door and guides me into the back seat.
“Ready?” the driver asks, a woman with oversized dark sunglasses and a baseball cap over lilac hair.
“Ready,” I manage.
The driver’s name is Frankie. She explains that the clinic is unexceptional but safe. The doctor takes patients from the shelter in the morning before opening to the public. “She won’t ask for any information you don’t want to give. So remember that, okay? Everything is up to you.”
They sound so nice, these five words. Everything is up to me.
I sit low in my seat, shoulders hunched, watching through the bottom of the window as the neighborhoods pass by.
We’re moving in the general direction of Mount Washington; my pulse quickens, and I worry that this is where she’s bringing me.
That this is a trick, an elaborate charade to get me out of the shelter because they’ve realized I am, in fact, too much of a liability, and they can no longer protect me.
But then we veer north and I see we’re aiming for Glendale.
I don’t have to wait when we arrive. I’m shown straight to a back room, where a nurse takes my vitals. She tuts at my low blood pressure, asks me to pee in a cup, and leaves. When I’m done in the restroom, I lie down on the examination table.
I haven’t yet seen a doctor for this pregnancy—how could I if I didn’t want Xander to know?—and now that I’m here, ready to face it for the first time, I’m terrified. What if the tests reveal it’s all in my head? Or perhaps worse—that it’s not. My fear is water on sand.
The silence here is different from the silence at the shelter. Magnified. The paper crinkles beneath me as I turn my head. I wonder how many women this clinic has seen in these early morning hours. How many children.
I’ve already fallen asleep when the doctor knocks on the door. She waits for me to come back around, introduces herself as Dr. Singler, and scans my chart. She asks what medications I usually take. I tell her, and explain that I’ve been tapering off.
I expect her to ask why, but she only nods. “So you know you’re pregnant.”
My eyes fill with tears.
“And how is that going?”
“The pregnancy or the withdrawal?”
“Both.”
“Not well,” I admit.
She bites her cheek, holding back. I want to applaud her for her restraint. She gets that I don’t want to talk about the sickly bruises. Or how I got here, to this point. It’s impossible to be certain, but I don’t think she recognizes me.
“Do you know how far along you are?”
I can’t remember what day it is. “Around nine weeks?”
The doctor nods kindly. “Shall we take a look, then?”
She calls out the door, and a nurse wheels in an ultrasound machine.
Dr. Singler snaps a condom on a wand, squirts on a dime of jelly, and asks if I’m ready.
I am suddenly awash with white-hot panic.
I can’t do this, my lizard brain says. This may be your last chance, my heart responds.
I try to picture myself raising Xander’s baby.
A little human with blond hair, blue eyes.
I wanted this once. I can’t wrap my mind around the injustice of getting it now, here.
My heart thunders so hard it hurts to breathe. “Go ahead.”
The first time Xander saw the tiny sac on the ultrasound monitor, he wept.
Big, fat tears rolling down his cheeks. The sight stunned me more than the positive test. I’m glad he’s not here today.
I’m glad he never knew. This is my secret.
Mine, and Mitali’s, and Dr. Singler’s. The only person weeping now is me.
BODY SWAYING WITH the car as it bumps its way back, I close my eyes and compose a letter to Benny in my head.
Let’s say you’re at a crossroads. There’s no going back where you came from, there’s only forward, and both roads begin with a terrifying tunnel, so dark and twisty it’s impossible to know what’s on the other side. How do you choose?
Xander coddled me when I was pregnant. No task was too small to take off my plate.
He touched my belly a thousand times a day.
Sang to my womb. Rubbed my feet. Brought me any food I desired.
I was rarely nauseated, just tired. Tired and panicked because I had no idea what I was going to do with a real live baby.
And then we lost her.
I expect Dr. Singler thought I left my husband because I was pregnant.
To protect myself. To protect the baby. And I did.
But at the same time, if he’d known I was pregnant, he would never have lost his temper.
He would have wrapped me in his arms and whispered every promise under the sun.
He would have been good. And if the worst happened, he would have shielded me from the outside world, and he would have let me wallow, and we would have wallowed together, while also drifting further apart.
“You have choices,” Dr. Singler said, and I laughed through my tears because this wasn’t a choice. I didn’t choose this. Xander did. And now he’s dead.